tle disagreement with her husband, was guilty of the horrible cruelty of pouring molten lead into his ear as he lay asleep. He did not die, but his sufferings were intense and prolonged. The girl was tried for the offence; her counsel did not venture to affirm that his client had not committed the deed imputed to her, but suggested that it might have been the unhappy result of a mental aberration. The jury found this conceit so excellent that it extenuated the circumstances up to the point of depriving them of the semblance of guilt. They returned a verdict recording the innocence of this interesting criminal.
Another time two women being tired of their respective husbands agreed to poison them both at the same moment. This they effected, but not without discovery. It is not to the police, however, but to the juries, that criminals must in France look for escape. They were tried and found guilty, but with extenuating circumstances. One would imagine, from the rareness of an acquittal and the frequency of les circonstances atténuantes, that the juries were in the habit of reducing to a mean the entire guilt and innocence brought before them; the result being an average of extenuating circumstances. A witty writer observed that, under such a state of things, it was a matter of wisdom to kill your wife rather than let her be bored by you. "If you assassinate her," he says, "you are let off with the galleys; but if you bore her, she assassinates you."
A poor woman named Rosalie, unable to support her child, and not having the courage to take it herself to the hospice for les enfans trouvés, agreed with a neighbor that he should convey it thither for a certain monetary consideration, to procure which the poor woman gave her last sou, and sold the remnant of her scanty wardrobe. When the day came, the man expended the money in drink, and then coolly threw the child on the ground, crushed its head with the heel of his wooden sabot, and digging a hole in the ground buried it out of sight. It will hardly be believed that any jury could find extenuating circumstances in this ruffianly case; but, nevertheless, so it was. Guilty with the invariable addition of les circonstances atténuantes.
A woman, married to a bricklayer, and who, it is to be presumed, had at least some sentiment of hostility towards her husband, took the opportunity, when he was working at the bottom of a well, to kill him by literally stoning him to death with her own hands. In this case the jury promptly found a verdict of guilty with extenuating circumstances.
Another case of les circonstances atténuates was that of a girl who stole a watch, not, as it was clearly proved, through the pressure of poverty. A periodical remarking on the verdict observed that "no doubt the jury had reflected that if every person in want were to steal, robberies would become deplorably common, whereas for the caprices of the well-conditioned allowances had to be made."
At Isère a man set fire to the loft where his father (a paralytic man upwards of eighty years of age) slept, and fairly roasted him to death. It was remembered by witnesses that the accused had threatened his father in these words: "I would like to see thee roasted like a toad on a shovel" ("Ah, gredin, je voudrais te voir rôtir comme un crapaud sur une pelle"). And he had to the best of his ability redeemed his promise. The jury, struck with admiration at the scrupulous fidelity with which the prisoner had kept his word, returned a verdict of guilty, but with extenuating circumstances.
The above are only a few instances, selected at random as we have said, with which the records of the French tribunals abound. For the eccentricity of the conclusions at which these French jurymen arrived, we do not attempt to account; our own impression being that from the annals of crime it would be impossible to collect circumstances which could more justly be considered as aggravating rather than extenuating in their character.—Cornhill Magazine.
